Fringe groups are seeking to manipulate the media and tech companies with accusations of anti-conservative bias, aiming to invoke anger among conservatives and provoke reactions from journalists and the tech industry, according to danah boyd*, a Microsoft Research principal researcher and founder of the Data & Society research group. The situation is making journalists and others in the media business desperate to prove that they aren’t biased, boyd said during her address at the Online News Association conference in Austin, Texas. For example, she said, social media companies hesitate to ban people who violate terms of service because they fear that banning users will feed into accusations of bias. She said these groups “can pervert the logics of media to spread conspiratorial and hateful messages under their false flag of conservatism.” This was the topic of boyd’s Sept. 13 keynote address. She explained that these media manipulators want to be seen as “digital martyrs.” For them, the key to success is to become newsworthy. Once these manipulators become newsworthy, she said, their strategy is to frame the situation through phrases that drive people to find them through search engines. Because journalists are able to amplify messages, boyd said, people want to manipulate them. When journalists use these specific phrases and terms in their reporting, they unintentionally feed into the manipulators’ games. At the ONA Conference, boyd told a room full of journalists: “You could’ve conveyed the same information without giving people a search term that served as a recruiting vehicle for those propagating… [Read full story]